Fellow aviation professionals: is it time to take a fresh look at your organisation?

As we know, European aviation is highly regulated and EU Regulation 376/2014, which became effective in November 2015, shows the industry is relentless in its pursuit of safety excellence. The EU Regulation 376/2014 unifies and consolidates the continuous collection of safety data; it facilitates wider analysis, the earlier identification of hazards, shared learning and, consequently, the necessary oversight required to follow up on or share mitigating actions, revisions or corrections. But what about the effort needed by individuals and departments in meeting the requirements of this EASA update? As a former employee within the airline industry, and with over 20 years’ experience, I know only too well how much time and resource is needed and how the relative scale of your operation can impact upon the workload of individuals tasked with collating, reporting, assessing and acting wherever compliance demands. To date, it really has been a case of us all sharing our learnings and understandings, and helping each other deliver the required reporting which will help us all identify risk earlier. As proved at our recent user group discussions – and through my own customer interactions – interpretation, application and integration of the new mandate brings with it a range of questions. The challenge we must all now meet is adopting that additional requirement, incorporating new mandatory elements into our existing reporting processes and structures, mindful of requirement and mindful of how efficient your own procedures need to be. In larger organisations, scale helps of course. Safety departments and compliance teams are resourced to ensure individuals at an operational level find support readily available, in order to maintain their safety and operational targets. At the other end of the scale, tailor-made software equally assists, smoothing the multiplicity of reporting tasks potentially faced by one individual reporter. For us all, perhaps EU376 compliance should be looked at as an opportunity; is it a chance to take a fresh look at your organisation and at those tasked with delivering your compliance and safety objectives? How will the incorporation of EU376 be managed in your team? How are you managing today? EU376 is one more layer of reporting – mandated and requiring an efficient integration with your operation. Our SMS based solution, delivered within our Q-Pulse software, provides the means to build reporting in compliant format, efficiently and scaled to your structural needs. For the aviation team at Ideagen, this was an opportunity to meet a required industry mandate and find a methodology to support our existing customers and provide much needed capability for new customers alike. For you, perhaps it’s also an opportunity for review – is your SMS capability really creating the efficiency you need? It’s definitely a conversation worth having and one that I’d love to keep going. ----- Author: David Young, Software Developer at Ideagen Plc